If you do what the title asks, which takes fortitude at times, the ending is uplifting.
At 50, an aspiring writer confronts painful challenges in her past and present.
Fingersh’s memoir weaves together three topics—memories of her younger brother’s mental illness and death at 26, her bitter sense of failure and struggle to reconnect with her lost promise, and the serious health problems that emerge for her 18-year-old daughter during her freshman year of college. From the start, our ability to get into her account is hampered by her self-presentation, which alternates between dramatic intensity and not-that-funny self-deprecation. On the first page of the first chapter, for example, she announces, “For almost twenty years, I thought I’d been a pretty great parent. But in the past several months, I’d ventured into new and ugly territory—so ugly that it was polluting my psyche, so shameful I hadn’t told a soul.” Did she murder someone? No, actually, she felt pangs of jealousy when her daughter scored a cool internship. Putting this inner torment about her lost potential as a writer in the foreground of a book-length memoir creates a somewhat off-putting focus on how the sausage gets made. Repeatedly telling us that she is a cliche (“ I am a walking cliché,” “I was like a literal cliché,” etc.) doesn’t help. Fingersh admires people with great chosen names, like Cheryl Strayed, Bob Dylan, and Lady Gaga, but won’t change hers: “Personal principle,” she explains. “Self-deprecation had grown around my bad last name like a birthmark.” Like a birthmark that grows, perhaps. The more effective storylines in the book are the moving, carefully told narratives involving her brother and daughter, where Fingersh is able to push her fraught self-concept to the side a bit. Fortunately, it all makes sense in the end, thanks to revelations found in EMDR therapy.
If you do what the title asks, which takes fortitude at times, the ending is uplifting.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781538195284
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.
A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.
Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.
A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022
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